Can I see certain aspects of coding becoming automated? Certainly. And I can think of some visual ways of presenting code that are very attractive in the extra information they give to the programmer.
But something like, 'give me the set of all things that....'
(let
((set1 (remove-if
#'(lambda (x) (not (things that....)))
from-lst)))
'BODY)
How'd you do that in Excel? Probably something like SUMIF - (I don't really use Excel much so I don't know if there's something that returns a list of things matching a predicate.)
Yes, doubtless that can be expressed more concisely than the code. Heck you could wrap that up and just call it fetchset and have it go.
(set1 (fetchset (things-that) from-lst))
But there you're putting more load on the person learning the arcana of certain macros or functions - and it's honestly not that much more concise in terms of headspace, you still have to think about sets for it to make any sense at all. It's not clear how that would translate into a visual interface of any significant power or how doing so would simplify the concepts that one would have to learn.
You know? Will programming get more efficient? Count on it. Will we automate tasks that are just following a pattern? Yeah. But will we stop coding?
Well, if you think about coding as being typing, then maybe we will. I don't think that visual interfaces are efficient enough to let you stick together all the concepts you need in a reasonable space of time without actually typing - but it's possible.
But will we stop thinking computationally? (Which is the real essence of coding I feel.) I don't think so. It seems to me that you have to know what you want a computer to do, or you have to have the computer guess at it. And the problem with guessing at it, other than the computer being wrong, is that if you're not a precise thinker; if don't know fairly precisely what you want to do; then you can't even mean certain things. Assuming quicksort hasn't been invented yet, how do you tell the computer that you want quicksort if it's guessing, what cues does the computer take from a general expression that you want a faster kind of sort?
Now whether that will reduce coding to mathematics I don't know. I'd tend to think not, if for no better reason than that programming includes a kind of coevolutionary mastery that can be a more fitting route for some people into thinking about things like transformations and sets and so on. I'm deeply indebted to programming for helping me think about maths in a way other than my teacher just reading black-box formula at the class.